Home > Work > The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You
1 " A world constructed from the familiar is the world in which there's nothing to learn. "
― Eli Pariser , The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You
2 " It's a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest. In a complex world, almost everything affects you – that closes the loop on pecuniary self-interest. Customers are always right, but people aren't. "
3 " Our brains tread a tightrope between learning too much from the past and incorporating too much new information from the present. The ability to walk this line – to adjust to the demands of different environments and modalities – is one of human cognition's most astonishing traits. Artificial intelligence has yet to come anywhere close. "
4 " By constantly moving the flashlight of your attention to the perimeter of your understanding, you enlarge your sense of the world. "
5 " Eric Schmidt likes to point out that if you recorded all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003, it takes up about five billion gigabytes of storage space. Now were creating that much data every two days "
6 " Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another's point of view, but instead were more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead were being offered parallel but separate universes. "
7 " Personalization filters serve a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar in leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown. "
8 " More voices means less trust in any given voice. "
9 " The algorithms that orchestrate our ads are starting to orchestrate our lives. "
10 " 1973 Fair Information Practices:- You should know who has your personal data, what data they have, and how it is used.- You should be able to prevent information collected about you for one purpose from being used for others.- You should be able to correct inaccurate information about you.- Your data should be secure...while it's illegal to use Brad Pitt's image to sell a watch without his permission, Facebook is free to use your name to sell one to your friends. "
11 " Your computer monitor is a kind a one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click. "
12 " When you read books on your Kindle, the data about which phrases you highlight, which pages you turn, and whether you read straight through or skip around are all fed back into Amazon’s servers and can be used to indicate what books you might like next. When you log in after a day reading Kindle e-books at the beach, Amazon is able to subtly customize its site to appeal to what you’ve read: If you’ve spent a lot of time with the latest James Patterson, but only glanced at that new diet guide, you might see more commercial thrillers and fewer health books. "
13 " Personalization is based on a bargain. In exchange for the service of filtering, you hand large companies an enormous amount of data about your daily life--much of which you might not trust your friends with. "
14 " The filter bubble tends to dramatically amplify confirmation bias—in a way, it’s designed to. Consuming information that conforms to our ideas of the world is easy and pleasurable; consuming information that challenges us to think in new ways or question our assumptions is frustrating and difficult. This is why partisans of one political stripe tend not to consume the media of another. As a result, an information environment built on click signals will favor content that supports our existing notions about the world over content that challenges them. "
15 " If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. —Andrew Lewis, under the alias Blue_beetle, on the Web site MetaFilter "
16 " Google is great at helping us find what we know we want, but not at finding what we don't know we want. "
17 " A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. —Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder "
18 " What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be anyone—where, in the words of the famous New Yorker cartoon, nobody knows you’re a dog—is now a tool for soliciting and analyzing our personal data. According to one Wall Street Journal study, the top fifty Internet sites, from CNN to Yahoo to MSN, install an average of 64 data-laden cookies and personal tracking beacons each. Search for a word like “depression” on Dictionary.com, and the site installs up to 223 tracking cookies and beacons on your computer so that other Web sites can target you with antidepressants. Share an article about cooking on ABC News, and you may be chased around the Web by ads for Teflon-coated pots. Open—even for an instant—a page listing signs that your spouse may be cheating and prepare to be haunted with DNA paternity-test ads. The new Internet doesn’t just know you’re a dog; it knows your breed and wants to sell you a bowl of premium kibble. "
19 " The Google self and the Facebook self, in other words, are pretty different people. There's a big difference between "you are what you click" and "you are what you share. "
20 " The most serious political problem posed by filter bubbles is that they make it increasingly difficult to have a public argument. "
